4 Ultimate FREE Apps For Executives. The Third App Is A Must!

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Are you always busy?

Do you seek to use technological advancements to your advantage?

If your answer to the questions is a resounding “yes“, then this article is for you!

Mobile apps can be categorised a thousand and one ways, from games and entertainment to business and personal finance. Based on Statista‘s findings, there are almost 6 million mobile apps in the world right now. This overwhelming supply of apps may lead to “choice paralysis”, where the presence of more choices make us less likely to take action, and to be less satisfied with our eventual decision.

In this article, I present you the top four apps that business owners endorse in their day-to-day productive business lifestyle.

Instructions to use Facebook Pages Manager:

User 1 – Before this app, there was no real easy way to manage my myriad Facebook pages from a mobile device. Loading images, posting links, and checking on notifications across multiple pages is now pretty damn easy.

User 2 – The app lets the user have a good glance at all the crucial aspects of a page, such as notifications and messages, the wall of the page and the administrative tools that come with the usual Facebook page experience. The “Insights” page I found especially well done and useful to get all the important information in a second.

User 3 – It is a great way to keep you personal stuff separate form other things that are business related.

What do you dislike?

User 1 – Somewhat heavy for battery and hardware in general and it occupies almost 250 Mb of internal storage (before logging in).

User 2 – The only dislike that I have is that sharing posts is different than on the desktop software. I have more options on my desktop to share with groups/personal timeline etc. and unfortunately I can’t seem to do this from the facebook pages app.

User 3 – The metrics sometimes won’t be as detailed as you might need in order to make business decisions.

Image Map

These images map a sequence-by-sequence journey through downloading the free apps and what you can do with them!

Click on “Get Started”Next, enter the Email Address and Password to your Facebook AccountThereafter, you will be directed to your Page. This is where you can stay updated and make updates. Click on “Promote”You can 1) Promote your Website, 2) Promote your local business, and/or 3) Promote your PagePromote your Website: 1) Define audience’s location(s), interests, age, and gender, 2) Set budget, 3) Schedule the duration of advertisement, 4) Make paymentPromote your local business: 1) Define audience’s location(s), age, and gender, 2) Select call to action, 3) Set budget, 4) Schedule the duration of advertisement, 5) Make paymentPromote your Page: 1) Define audience’s location(s), interests, age, and gender, 2) Set budget, 3) Schedule the duration of advertisement, 4) Make paymentClick on the globe icon to check your notificationsClick on the speech bubbles icon to go to your inboxClick the graph icon to review InsightsClick on the image icon to manage the pics in your PageClick on the calendar icon for a view of past and upcoming eventsClick on the tool icon to edit Page settingsClick on your current Page’s icon and a dropdown list of other Pages will appear

If you curate content for your blog or social media profiles, then you must have a reader like Feedly where you can get the latest articles that are more relevant to your business.

Feedly is available on desktop, as well as through iOS and Android apps. With the Feedly app, you can access all of your Collections on your phone wherever you go, so that you’re always learning and being productive. Whether you use Feedly on desktop or on mobile your content is always synchronized.

Once you’ve downloaded and logged in to Feedly on your mobile device, it can take time to find the setup that works best for you.

Here are some useful tips to get you started with Feedly mobile:

Click on the search icon to explore all the content on Feedly. If you already have something in mind, go ahead and search for it.

If you’ve logged in with Facebook or Twitter, Feedly will access your profile and present a few topics that you might be interested in.

If you’re still not quite sure what you’re looking for, scroll through the list of popular topics for inspiration. Clicking any of these topics gives you a list of popular sites related to your topic. Browse these sites until you find one you like, then click the plus icon to add it to your Feedly.

Reviews:

User 1 – Feedly is a very well crafted RSS feed application. Since the shutdown of Google Reader I have been using it and I gotta say I love it. It’s cross platform, and provides a clean feed as well as many options for sharing content on top of that. The one knock is not having the Gmail address book import feature. That would make it perfect in my opinion.

User 2 – Feedly is a great tool for following your favorite websites, and making sure you’re up-to-date on your favorite interests even if you aren’t sure which sites to check. It saves you time and effort by aggregating the best articles and videos into one place, so you don’t need to go all over the internet to stay informed and find something great to read.

User 3 – Great newspaper like style. Great categorization of content.

Image Map

Log in with Google or FacebookA grid of topics welcome youClick on one of the grids and a list of sites will appear. This list reflects “Tech” siteWhen you select a site, you will be brought to their homepage. Subsequently, click on the + icon at the top right corner to add the site to your feedly and receive updatesWhen you click on the + icon, feedly will prompt you to “create new collection” where you can categorise and store the contentI named it “tech topics”. You can call it whatever you wantAfter you click the green “create” button, the collection and publication site will be reflected on the main panelSee an article you like? You can either bookmark it, create a Knowledge Board, or share it on Facebook by clicking the icons on the top right cornerI named my Knowledge Board “Tech Board”. Call it whatever you wantLastly, click on the three dotted icon for more sharing options

Web Analytics is crucial for every website, even for a small blog. Analytics help website owners really understand where their visitors come from, what do they do there, and which visitors bring value to the website. Most importantly, analytics help save costs in the areas where money is being spent, but little or nothing is coming back in return. Instead, more money can be allocated to the channel that yields the most.

One of the free and reliable web analytic softwares in the market is Google Analytics. If you don’t already have it, you need to jump on the bandwagon right now.

Data Analytics & Reporting

Reports can be segmented and filtered to reflect the needs of your business. Real-time views let you know which new content is popular, how much traffic today’s new promotion is driving to your site, and which tweets and blog posts draw the best results.

Data Activation

Make smarter marketing decisions. Google Analytics allows you to eliminate the guesswork from website design by doing test variations of your pages and learning which designs bring you the most conversions. Furthermore, the software also accesses your potential and existing customers to select relevant ads for those same products as they surf the web.

Here’s the deal, Google Analytics doesn’t tell you how your business is doing without some additional setup. You have to tell Google Analytics to keep track of what’s critical to your business – and you do this with goals.

In Google Analytics, you have four ways to track goals:

URLs

Time

Pages/visit

Events

Where to Find Google Analytics Goals

To start setting up your goals:

Go to your Google Analytics standard reports

Click on the Admin button in the top right

Click on Goals

From one of the Goal sets, click + Goal to set up a new goal

First, give your goal a clear name.

The “active” or “inactive” options allow you to control whether the goal is functioning. If you ever want to turn the goal off, pick “inactive.” You won’t be able to delete your goal, you can only deactivate it.

Next, let’s go through the 4 different goals we can set.

1. URL Destination Goal

This keeps track of specific URLs. Each time someone goes to that URL, they trigger the goal.

Goal URL: This is the URL that will trigger a goal. Don’t enter in the full URL, use only what comes after the domain. So if the full URL is www.webimp.com.sg/home, enter in /home.

Match Type: This determines how strict Google Analytics is when deciding if a URL counts.

For exact match, only the specific URL will work. Nothing else. If there’s a query string or unique ID for the session on the end of the URL, it won’t count. So don’t use exact match if you have a system that’s constantly generating unique URLs for each visitor.

Case Sensitive: Usually, you’ll want to leave this box unchecked. Check this box if lowercase and uppercase characters in your URL go to more than one page.

Goal Values: When you set up a goal, you have the option of assigning a monetary amount to the conversion.

Every action a user takes can be translated into a dollar amount. One way to help determine what a goal value should be is to evaluate how often the users who complete the goal become customers.

For example, if your sales team can close 10% of people who sign up for a newsletter, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 to your newsletter sign-up goal. Simply key in “50”.

Goal Funnels: Goal funnels allow you to see exactly how many people move through each step of your marketing process. You’ll know how many people abandon your funnel at each step so you know what pages need fixing.But be careful, goal funnels really only work when you require your visitors to move through a series of pages. Unless required, visitors seldom follow a clear path on your site and a goal funnel won’t help you make any sense of how your visitors move from page to page. For paths with less structure, use the Visitors Flow report.

2. Visit Duration Goal

You can use this to track how many people stay on your site for a certain amount of time.

Condition: Decide whether you want the goal to be activated on any visit that lasts more or less than the threshold you provide.

Hours, Minutes, and Seconds: Specify the exact time you want to use for the goal. For the best data, have a time that not everyone reaches but some people do. If too many people activate the goal, you won’t be able to figure out how to improve your site. The same thing will happen if too few people reach it.

Goal Value: See above!

3. Pages/Visit Goals

This goal tracks the number of pages each visitor sees before they leave.

Condition: Just like visit duration, decide whether you want the goal to be activated when a visitor views a particular number of pages.

Number of Pages Visited: Simply set the number of pages that you want to activate.

Goal Values: See above!

4. Event Goal

Any element that your visitors interact with can be tracked with events.

The event goal will only trigger if the event matches each one that you’ve defined. So if you only define the category, the goal won’t care about actions, labels, or values. But if you define all four, the event must match all of them for the goal to activate.

Step 2: Use the actual event value if that value is directly tied to revenue. If not, use a new goal value that is. Or leave the goal value blank.

These are the 4 goals you can set for your business, using Google Analytics. Credits to www.kissmetrics.com for the guide to Google Analytics Goals!

Lastly, click here for an in-depth user review of Google Analytics, by eethuu.com.

To protect the company’s confidentiality, I can’t show you an image map of Google Analytics. However, this should be yet another reason why you should get Google Analytics! It is thaat personalised and vital in your business.

Going paperless is a huge trend. It’s not only about workflow automation and data accessibility. Furthermore, the fewer documents you print, the more trees are left out there to absorb carbon dioxide.

Use the app to scan documents and receipts. Genius Scan automatically converts the images into editable PDF files. Moreover, this scanner app is free-of-charge!

No log in is required. Once you open the app, you can scan a document by clicking on the orange button at the bottom leftAs good as taking a photoOnce you snap a shot, the image will turn black-and-white, just like a scanned copy. Click on “New Document” to save and rename the documentClick on the date in orange font colour to change the title of the documentRename the document under TITLE and edit page settings if neededYou are given many options to export the document

Conclusion

There are many other free apps that are huge treasures to the busy business executive, but here are 4 for a start. In this digital age, it is extremely disadvantageous if you refuse to use the efficiency and productivity boosters available in the market. Moreover, these are free of charge! So go get them now and watch your business improve.